UNICEF estimated that more than half a million children were affected by the August 2021 earthquake, making them among the most numerous and most vulnerable victims of a disaster that had already devastated one of the poorest and most fragile countries in the Western Hemisphere. Children who had survived the earthquake faced a cascade of risks: physical injury, psychological trauma, family separation, loss of educational access, and heightened vulnerability to exploitation.
In the chaos of the immediate post-earthquake period, family separations were a serious concern. Children who had been injured and taken to medical facilities in different locations from their parents, children separated during the panic of the earthquake itself, and orphaned children whose parents had been killed all required identification, protection, and family tracing services. Child protection organizations worked urgently to prevent the situation from creating opportunities for child trafficking.
The loss of school buildings across the earthquake-affected region added an education crisis to the emergency. UNICEF documented hundreds of school buildings damaged or destroyed. Children who had already missed months of school due to COVID and the political crisis now faced further disruption, with no clear timeline for when educational facilities would be restored.
The psychological impact of the earthquake on children was severe and received insufficient attention in the initial emergency response. Children who had experienced the terror of the shaking, witnessed deaths or injuries, and lost their homes and familiar environments needed psychosocial support that was simply not available at the scale required. The long-term mental health consequences for a generation of children who had lived through one traumatic event after another in 2021 alone would take years to fully manifest and address.